Erosion Control Editor's Blog

Pay Now or Pay Later?

The US tends to spend far more on cleaning up after hurricanes and other natural disasters than on preparing for them, according to a recent editorial. The author, James Surowiecki, argues that we should be doing it the other way around, investing more in public infrastructure including flood protection. He cites the American Society of Civil Engineers’ “report card” on US infrastructure—the last overall grade was once again a D—and notes that by ASCE’s estimate, “federal spending on levees pays for itself six times over.”

He also recounts the story of the massive flooding in Holland in 1953, when an unprecedented storm surge killed close to 2,000 people and submerged half a million acres. The low-lying country, of course, already had extensive flood control measures in place, but the surge overwhelmed the existing dikes and levees. The Dutch government’s response was known as the Delta Plan—a decades-long, billions-of –guilders series of new flood control projects, from dams and dikes to a moveable sea wall, all of which have prevented further large-scale flooding. Some are now suggesting a similar type of sea wall to protect New York City. But the US has far more coastline that Holland does, and deciding what to protect is daunting.

As this article from the Wall Street Journal points out, the Dutch are once again trying to figure out how best to invest in flood protection; their own climate models show that the level of the North Sea will rise 16 inches by 2050 and as much as 13 feet by 2200. Some of the solutions are fantastically creative—if perhaps impractical on a large scale elsewhere. For example, the article describes a neighborhood southeast of Amsterdam, outside the protection of the dikes that surround the city. Each house there “is built on a buoyant hollow concrete cube and anchored by a mooring post. All utilities, including electricity and water, enter the house through flexible pipes.” During a recent storm, when flood waters reached 13 feet, the houses “floated up on the storm surge and then settled safely down when the flood receded several days later.”

The article also looks at some of the solutions other flood-prone cities, from Tokyo to Venice, have devised, including mobile floodgates and “superlevees.” Can the US afford to invest in similar measures? The bill for last year’s Hurricane Irene was about $16 billion, and damage from Hurricane Sandy is running to tens of billions of dollars. Paying up front might be the cheaper way to go.

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